Anyone familiar with the many open source licenses?

[Syngin]

Hope this is the right forum.

I'm in the middle of developing a client, task, invoicing and domain tracking web application that I was planning on releasing open source for the first version and then have the version behind the current version being released open source. (ie. once I finished the 3rd version and put it up for sale, version 2 would become Open Source)

Its not so much the money, (although it'll help), it's more of justifying the massive amounts of time I've been spending on this to my g/f. :(

At some point, I'm going to need help with it (ie. someone who knows how to create .deb.and .rpm installers) and have no problem is sharing the profits with those who help based on an amount-of-contribution basis.

My biggest problem is choosing from the bazzilion licenses available. Anyone have a link that might explain the various licenses or even have an idea of which particular license I should be looking at?

And with a setup like this, would I even be allow to host it on SourceForge?

Thanks.

[kam]

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
wow, there's quite a few there... Those are approved open-source licenses, so it might not include what you want.

If you release it under the GPL, that code could no longer be made 'proprietary,' even for just that new release.

BSD allows anybody to do whatever they want with the code... You could license each new release with this and still be able to sell the current one, but other people could sell it too. :p

[Syngin]

Thanks for the info, cam.

Looks like I have a lot of reading ahead of me.

[El_Cu_Guy]

If you release it under the GPL, that code could no longer be made 'proprietary,' even for just that new release.

Actually it's the right of the original developer/copyright holder to change the license at any time for future versions. All previous released would still be GPL'd.

[kam]

Originally posted by El_Cu_Guy
Actually it's the right of the original developer/copyright holder to change the license at any time for future versions. All previous released would still be GPL'd. But all that code that has been GPL'd would have to stay GPL'd, correct? Continuing use of that code would be a derivative of the GPL'd code, which means the new code must also be GPL'd.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by kam
But all that code that has been GPL'd would have to stay GPL'd, correct? Continuing use of that code would be a derivative of the GPL'd code, which means the new code must also be GPL'd. Nope.

You wrote all that code. You own it. Basically, you're re-releasing it under a different license. Perfectly OK.

If someone has a copy with the GPL attached, then they have all the rights that come with having a GPL'ed program. If someone has a proprietary copy (side note: yes, you can sell GPL'ed programs, you just have to make the source available to anyone that can get a binary, for no more than the cost of distribution -- easiest thing is to put the source with the binary on the CD), they can only use it under the terms of that license. Yes, I know, it's the same software, that doesn't matter.

And this is quite different if you accept significant patches to the project. If the person who sends you a patch knows that it will be used in the proprietary version, and allows it, that's fine (they also have to allow it to be changed over to the GPL later, though). But it might be hard to make sure they know this.

It sounds like you're wanting to use a model similar to what Aladdin uses with GhostScript. They sell the current release, and give away the previous release under the Aladdin Public License. I think -- they might put out the current release under the APL, and distribute the previous release under the GPL, though.

[sploo22]

An example of what bwkaz said about patches: the popular photorealistic 3D graphics program POV-Ray (http://www.povray.org) was originally written by a small group of people and released under a quite restrictive license; particularly, modified versions of the source could not be distributed.

The next version is planned to be relicensed under the GPL. Unfortunately, since there have been many contributions from many people who are now out of contact, vast portions of the code must be rewritten from scratch.